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At the moment my favourite way to do (simple) elaborations and conversions of multimedia file is FFMPEG. But i understand that is not exactly the most user-friendly tool around, so if you don’t want to open the terminal and read the man page of FFMPEG perhaps you could take a look at Yakito.

Yakito is a free and open media files converter, using the benefits of the project FFMPEG to achieve maximum compatibility with most multimedia formats and codecs.Unlike other solutions, Yakito is not intended to be a simple frontend interface to manage an installation of FFMPEG, but uses this engine to convert/encode video in an independent way (FFMPEG it’s integrated in the executable itself, so it’s transparent).For this it relies on Jave , another free software project.

Some info on JAVE

The JAVE (Java Audio Video Encoder) library is Java wrapper on the ffmpeg project. Developers can take advantage of JAVE to transcode audio and video files from a format to another. In example you can transcode an AVI file to a MPEG one, you can change a DivX video stream into a (youtube like) Flash FLV one, you can convert a WAV audio file to a MP3 or a Ogg Vorbis one, you can separate and transcode audio and video tracks, you can resize videos, changing their sizes and proportions and so on. Many other formats, containers and operations are supported by JAVE.

Back on Yakito

Yakito has been designed to get as simple as possible, so it is suitable for users without knowledge of multimedia formats and codecs, thanks to its system of “conversion profiles” such as smartphone, mp4 or handheld game console (very easily expandable through updates or manually). In addition, Yakito has an interface available in many of the most common languages.

Finally, the idea is that Yakito is fully upgradeable via the Internet, so that the creation of new languages ​​and profiles from the community is automatically transferred to the users. In addition, anyone can create new profiles and languages ​​very easily, and thus expand the possibilities of its application, and even contribute to the development without having any programming knowledge!.

Installation

The project it’s new, so you’ll not find the package in the repository of your repository (I’ve found it only in AUR for Arch), so the alternative is to use the package that you can download from the official site, it’s a bash that you must run as root :

Conclusion

The program it’s still a bit immature, the site and the documentation are only in Spanish (but the software it’s available in English), but for what I’ve seen could help a lot new users, or anyone that don’t want to search for all the flags of FFMPEG, in file conversion.

It surely has the potential to become another great piece of software for the community.